Gary Wadler, Antidoping Pioneer, Had a Gift for Straight Talk

Gary Wadler in 2005, when he testified before Congress on the use of steroids in baseball. Wadler, a Long Island physician who became a pioneer in the world of antidoping, died Tuesday at age 78.

Gerald Herbert / Associated Press

September 13, 2017

Sports of The Times

By JULIET MACUR

While on a trip to Stockholm nearly a decade ago, Gary Wadler and his wife, Nancy, visited the palace, where they were offered a chance to pose for a photograph with Queen Silvia of Sweden. Just before the camera clicked, Wadler threw his arm around the queen and flashed a big smile, just as he might have posed with an old friend.

But that snapshot was consummate Wadler, the antidoping pioneer who died Tuesday at age 78. The son of a Brooklyn window-trimmer, Wadler was friendly, not formal. Studied, but never staid.

He grew up to be a doctor and a professor of medicine at New York University, and approachability was always one of his biggest assets. It’s part of the reason he served for decades as an unofficial translator of the subject of performance-enhancing drugs.

When reporters called Wadler for his guidance while covering one drug scandal or another — and I can’t count the number of times I called — he didn’t overwhelm them with scientific or medical jargon. In the same manner in which he might deal with a patient in his internist’s practice on Long Island, Wadler was always patient, always helpful, always eager to dumb down highly technical terms without making the questioner feel dumb.

Wadler didn’t mind the tutorials. In fact, he thought they were vital. He often talked to me about how important it was that the public understand that steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs could be dangerous — to elite athletes, for sure, but to young ones, too. Wadler feared ignorance more than the drugs themselves, just as he worried that “steroid fatigue” would keep people from caring.

Long before the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative steroids scandal, and way before Lance Armstrong came clean, Wadler was telling Americans that doping in sports was a scourge. Wadler knew so much about antidoping science and the culture of doping in sports that he wrote a seminal book, “Drugs and the Athlete,” which was published in 1989, years before the subject of steroids became a standard feature of the sports pages.

“I grew up believing that our sports heroes were genuine, that they were great athletes because they had special skills and trained harder,” he told Newsday in 2003.

But he also understood how much times had changed.

When Taylor Hooton, a teenage Texas pitcher, committed suicide in 2003 after stopping his steroid use, Hooton’s father, Don, reached out to Wadler for answers to his many questions.

“Over many calls and many hours, he educated me and pointed me to reading material, helping me understand what anabolic steroids are and what they do to the mind and body,” Don Hooton said Wednesday. “Some of these experts start off with going into all the technical stuff with doping, and they can lose you really quick. But Gary put things in a way that I could understand, and was so compassionate.”

Wadler later encouraged Hooton to start a foundation to fight steroid use among young people, and went on to serve as its chairman.

But he also testified to Congress during the 2005 baseball steroid hearings. He criticized the WWE for not doing enough to combat drug use in professional wrestling, and he questioned the N.F.L.’s drug-testing program because he found it odd that more players were not testing positive in a sport in which athletes could surely benefit from banned drugs.

More times than I can count, Wadler called the N.F.L.’s rules “blatantly ridiculous” when we spoke about them.

“It took guts to stand up to so many people and so many leagues like he did,” Nancy Wadler said. “But I like the truth. Gary liked the truth.”

That truth went both ways. When the former N.F.L. lineman Lyle Alzado was dying of brain cancer in 1991, he blamed his many years of steroid and human growth hormone use. Some were happy to let this idea circulate widely, perhaps to scare younger athletes away from steroid use. But Wadler said, no, there wasn’t actually a scientific connection between steroids and cancer. Wadler didn’t ring alarm bells just to ring them.

It didn’t take long for his reputation to spread internationally. He was a founding member of the World Anti-Doping Agency when it was formed in 2000, and at one point he led the committee that determined what substances would be on the agency’s banned list.

“I didn’t know much about him when he appeared at WADA, but I soon realized that this is a man who knows what he is talking about,” said Arne Ljungqvist, a former chairman of the International Olympic Committee’s medical commission, who met Wadler soon after WADA was formed.

Ljungqvist said WADA’s prohibited-substance committee initially was filled with researchers like him and experts in subjects like pharmacology, hematology and chemistry, a group that he said was heavy on credentials and missing a common touch. Wadler, he found, provided a refreshing perspective.

“As a medical doctor, he filled a gap which made the commission complete,” Ljungqvist said. “He had knowledge that some didn’t. I looked upon him as one of my best friends.”

Ljungqvist liked Wadler because he had a lot of common sense, and because he wasn’t the type of man who would promote himself. Wadler was just so very likable, said Ljungqvist, who was the person who arranged Wadler’s meeting with Queen Silvia.

A day after Wadler died, Nancy Wadler told me that Queen Silvia story. In a conversation that lasted most of the morning, she laughed a lot. And she cried some, too.

She said she had been going through their belongings lately, and among them she had found a gigantic teddy bear candle he had given her when they began dating in the early 1970s. They were married for 45 years, and often discussed why their relationship lasted that long.

“It’s really a mirror of honesty, having principles you live by, integrity and giving back to the world,” Nancy Wadler said. “You could say that also was his philosophy about his doping work.”